Doreiku: The Animation (aka āSlave Districtā)
Itās probably no secret by now that I love:
Competition animes with high stakes
Righteous revenge stories
So hey! An anime about people who are willingly risking their own enslavement in a series of different games? Sounds fucked up and intense...
This thing came out in Spring 2018. It deals with a device called the āSCMāĀ which is worn like a retainer. It taps into the userās nervous system, making it so any challenge or game between two SCM users becomes binding. The loser becomes enslaved to the winner, bound to do anything they are ordered to do.... with some exceptions (the loser cannot be made to kill themselves or to hurt their master, to cite two examples).
Of course, you donāt have to keep the loser as your personal servant or whatever; the option always exists to verbally āreleaseā them from any eventual servitude. In practice, though, this doesnāt really occur. People are too corrupt to allow their āassetsā to go free.
Letās not beat around the bush: This concept is VERY dark and has a lot of GROSS sexual/rapey implications to it. The very first episode literally opens with a teaser scene where someone uses the device to make someone verbally agree to sex - so, yāknow, thatās already some psychological torture and if he follows through and does it, thatās clearly rape - though we are gratefully spared the pain of seeing ANY part of what presumably followed.
Fucking THANKFULLY,Ā the first episode is also the worst Iāve seen in this department. Iām now halfway through the series, and although a lot of people have been manipulated into doing jobs or physical tasks against their will, the literal rapeiness is far, far behind us. Thereās also no sexualization of the worst elements at this point ā in spite of the manga covers that depict characters bound up in BDSM gear, itās purely metaphorical. Which isnāt to say that making people perform jobs or tasks that physically harm them or that they just donāt wanna do isnāt a giant form of violation, but... well. Weāve met a lot of characters in this unnamed Japanese city, and at least up until now, none of the ones involved in theĀ āgameā are portrayed as enjoying their subjugation (though we certainly have to deal with āmastersā who are taking far too much pleasure in their power).
Our unlikely heroine is Eia, an isolated and cynical 20-year-old who is struggling with her detachment from reality, emotions, and basically everything. Through a series of events, she becomes aware of the existence of the SCM and agrees to become the āinsurance partnerā to a user of the device. In essence, she is given control of a large sum of money and an extra SCM; if the person in question is enslaved, sheās expected to free them using what she has.
Eia begins the series as someone who just wants to observe the sick game and find out what her own limits are as a person. The thrill of watching the games and coping with her own feelings are all sheās interested in when we start out. Even so, despite her insistence that she doesnāt care about anything, she is swift to step in to take care of her friend in the first ep, so it seems like she might be denying her innate goodness. And sure enough, it isnāt long into the series when she finds a feeling she canāt ignore: disgust towards the entire concept of enslavement and manipulation.
Other characters are gradually introduced who have one of the 24 devices floating around the city. Each character wearing one gets a 10-minute origin story at some point in the series, which said character narrates. These explain how their life brought them into the circle of the SCM game.Ā And naturally, all of the characters begin colliding with one another as we advance. Along the way, we also learn the relatively innocuous origins of the device and gets hints as to how it became this black-market high-dollar object of fear.
Hopefully, this doesnāt all collapse in the back half of the series, because the first six episodes have given me a lot of suspense and intensity and engaging characters. Thereās not a ton of humor, but there ARE formerly victimized women getting brutal revenge on men, and I kinda have a thing for that, so Iāve had adequate reasons to smile :P
Oh, and one of the users is a dog.
Which means we get a ten-minute story narrated by a dog.
So THATāS amazing, obviously.